And Vijay Says…

There is plenty of coverage in social media now on the infamous concept of stack ranking . And honestly it took me by surprise . I thought I will post couple of thoughts here . Poorly implemented stack ranking is just horrible and should be avoided at all costs. But my position is that some level of stack ranking is unavoidable when an organization reaches a certain size. And there are ways to do it better than the miserable ways I read about in blogs etc .

A profit making company has only a certain amount of resources to spend on compensation . I have worked for managers who had socialist tendencies of distributing available money more or less equally . This did no apparent good for team performance . The excellent performers felt cheated outright and many left the team . The poor performers interpreted it in a way that made them feel they are doing just fine .
In short , it was lose lose for my manager .

Stack ranking surely fosters competition amongst peers – the question is whether it is healthy or unhealthy .

If every manager has to stack rank – invariably only bad things can happen. No team has a perfect bell distribution and good people will lose out . And no A player will want to work with another A player ever again.

However if the pool of people is larger – this way of ranking might actually work ok . I have seen it work well first hand . Example – if the VP of west coast sales has a fantastic year and all his sales people exceeded quota , he won’t have any under performer that cycle . But VP of Central region might have some under performers . If the country manager tried to normalize the performance at country level – stack ranking would make more sense than each VP needing to do this with smaller teams .

Let’s not kid ourself – every company at a certain number of employees will have some poor performers that will weigh down everyone else . They need to be replaced periodically with new employees to keep the company healthy .

The result of stack ranking need not always be getting fired either . In many cases, a transfer to another manager or another role could change a poor performer to deliver better .

Annual performance exercises are useless – they are after the fact and there is nothing much the employee can do to change the decision . But if the performance management is a continuous process – it can easily work better . And that means line managers partnering actively with HR and not just checking boxes.

In my opinion, the good vs bad performer is not where the issue comes up. It is the average performers that pose the challenge . I had a manager who once told me about it this way – outrageously compensate the best ones , give enough to the average ones to make them try harder next time and give exit options to repeated poor performance people. I don’t think that strategy is bad – it is all about executing to the spirit and not the letter of the strategy .

As always – these are just my personal thoughts , not to be confused with my present or past employer policies .

Recently, I had a very interesting conversation with some old friends, some of whom were my past managers and some that worked for me. The question came up as to “if there is only one thing that you can suggest to someone to be more successful as a leader, what would be it?”.

There were many answers – and none were bad. My own take was “Don’t be a jerk”.

I am a pretty easy going guy – I don’t take offense at the drop of the hat. And while I don’t forget easily, I readily forgive. And knowing how many times I screw up, I ask for forgiveness readily too ( does not mean I get forgiven very easily all the time though 🙂 ). I have fond memories of every manager and leader I ever worked for – except one. And that one dude was a jerk, and I will happily starve to death than work for him one more time. You cannot believe the speed at which I walked out of that job.

Respect for the individual is at the core of leadership – and yet, traditional management lingo completely ignores it. People are not resources or capital that are to be optimized by a manager like inventory. Nothing agitates me more than people referring to others as resources. So if you are new to leadership, or are trying to find how to improve – start with “respect for the individual”.

Organizations mostly assume that process trumps people when scale is required. This is true – as long as people play along. And people won’t play along unless they see value in what they do as part of the process. The moment you fail to explain the value of their work is when you start donning the jerk costume. For you to explain, first you need to take time to understand and think through it. Trust me – it is time well spent.

Jerks thrive on secrecy. Don’t get me wrong – a lot that happens in the company needs to be held secret for good reasons. But over doing the whole “it’s a big secret” thing is terrible and it erodes trust rapidly. If you feel you are hoarding information and handing it out in chunks to your employees all the time – stop and reflect on it and fix it if needed. I have seen many managers suffer because someone above them realized first that the manager in question is just not giving enough information to their teams. If you recognize it before others, you win. If you don’t – you lose (now or in future, and it is fairly irreversible after the fact).

A version of secrecy is access control to superiors. The best managers I know of have always facilitated access for me to their managers. And I try my best to do that to people I manage. I once had a colleague email me that went “can you send me the status of your project so that I can send it to the big boss?”. I responded with the status of the project with a cc to the big boss asking “hey, is this the big boss you mentioned?”. I never had another incidence like that after that.

Jerks tend to blindside their employees. I firmly believe that a manager should reach out to the lowest rungs of the hierarchy directly on occasion and get a first hand pulse check. However, this should be done as an exception and not as a rule. Once you undermine the authority of your chain of command downwards – they won’t trust you anymore and you would have successfully earned the “jerk” title. Remember – authority and responsibility should go hand in hand. If you hold someone responsible, make sure she has the authority to do what you want to be accomplished. Otherwise you are setting her up to fail.

One final thought before my next call starts – these things alone don’t make you a jerk or prevent your from being successful necessarily . You can get away with most of these bad behaviors as long as your team knows that they won’t be punished for calling you on your bad ideas discretely in private. It is not ideal, but many managers that I think of as jerks succeed because they listen when someone tells them privately afterwards, and then they do something about it.

Be a good human being – and respect people around you.
And that is an order, damn it , you human resource 🙂

Common man loves these songs for their music , romantic nature and a million other reasons – and that included me till 2 days ago . I was on a flight from NY to NE early in the morning , and my iPhone chose to play me some Hindi songs . And probably because I had severe insomnia -I started connecting them to life in the software industry .

Here goes half a dozen – If you like it , I have another half dozen or more that I will post .

1. Aye Ajnabi

I am convinced this is the song for QA engineers who desperately are looking for bugs . They just want the bug to shout out to them and get them out of their misery

2. Awara hoon

What do software peeps hate the most ? I bet it is reorganization of teams repeatedly . I could totally imagine a reorged (that is a word that needs to be added to dictionary) person not feeling the love singing “Khar bar Nahin , sansar Nahin , mujch se kisi ko pyar Nahin ”

3. Mein pal do pal ka shayar hoon

Half the life of product teams are spent in convincing management that they have a bright idea that needs investment . This is true in start ups and big companies alike . And vast majority never get that approval and I can totally see them singing this , while they cry the self to sleep

4. Dum maro dum

When things get done , in many cases it happens because individuals got it done despite the “system” and not because of the system. And then they party like there is no tomorrow . I have seen people cry uncontrollably in a few cases – which are tears of joy .

5. Chalte chalte

Software peeps are living examples of great job mobility – especially engineers. The good ones never burn bridges – their swan song usually is about nostalgia and romance of good times . Occasionally they will make you wonder why would anyone leave if life was so good with old job. When I left IBM , a guy who worked for me sent me a text “hum laut aayenge, Tum yoohi bulate rahna” 🙂

6. Kabhi kabhi

Software world has a lot of people who are strongly attached at an emotional level to old technology, old methodologies and so on . It is very personal – and I have heard guys talk about old technology which will make a by stander wonder if he is getting nostalgic about his high school sweetheart . This is not a guy thing either – I have many woman colleagues who feel the same way too